The Salina Journal from Salina, Kansas • Page 14

B6 SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 2005 News SAUNA JOURNAL Briefly ARREST Yates defense won't push for freedom HOUSTON The mother whose convictions in her children's drownings were tossed over false witness testimony is unlikely to see freedom soon, her lawyers said. The expert witness, meanwhile, said Friday he made an honest mistake and contended he got the erroneous information during a "passing conversation" with prosecutors. Defense attorney George Parnham said he had no plans to seek Andrea Yates' release from the state prison where she works in the flower garden and has janitorial duties. A state appeals court on Thursday determined that the false testimony from forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz led to her improper conviction in three of the five children's drownings in 2001. During trial, Dietz, a consultant for the television program "Law Order," described what he said was a show about a woman found innocent by reason of insanity for drowning her children.

Jury seated for alleged abuse leader FORT HOOD, Texas A jury of 10 soldiers was selected Friday to decide whether the accused ringleader of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal was illegally beating inmates or following orders to rough up the detainees for interrogation. Opening statements begin Monday in the court-martial of Spc. Charles Graner Uniontown, the first soldier to be tried in the scandal. Graner, pictured in some of the notorious photographs of Iraqi inmates being sexually humiliated at the Baghdad prison, was upbeat after the jury was picked. "The sun is shining, the sky is blue and this is America," said Graner, who sat calmly at the defense table Friday and may testify on his own behalf.

"Whatever happens is going to happen, but I still feel it's going to be on the positive side." The jury is made up of four officers and six enlisted men, -all stationed at Fort Hood and all of whom had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Bush pushes for overhaul of tax code WASHINGTON President Bush on Friday asked two former senators and a panel of tax experts to craft a tax-simplification plan, with marching orders to reduce the burden on American filers and to encourage job growth. In his re-election bid last year. Bush made overhauling the tax code a major campaign promise that he repeated across the country. On Friday, he handed off the task to a bipartisan group of former lawmakers and tax experts who are expected to report back by July 31.

Bush inaugural fund drive hits $18 million WASHINGTON The team collecting private donations to finance President Bush's inaugural festivities has taken in $18 million, putting it nearly halfway to its goal of at least $40 million. Bush's inaugural committee raised about $4.5 million of that total over the past week, according to updated donor information posted Friday on its Web site. Those donating $250,000 become inaugural "underwriters" and receive a sponsorship package that includes tickets to various inaugural-week events featuring President Bush and first lady Laura Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne. Among those donating $250,000 were include Cinergy Bank of America, the Bristol-Myers Squibb pharmaceutical manufacturer and United Parcel Service. Crematory operator pleads guilty CLEVELAND, Tenn.

A former crematory operator who admits dumping 334 bodies and passing off cement dust as their remains pleaded guilty Friday to Tennessee charges and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Marsh allegedly stopped performing cremations at the crematory in Noble, in 1997, when he took over the family business. Investigators discovered the ghastly scene of bodies scattered on the crematory property in February 2002 after receiving an anonymous tip. From Wire Service Reports Reputed Klansman pleads The Associated Press Reputed Ku Kiux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen waits Friday in the Neshoba County Courthouse to be arraigned on murder charges. DISASTER Killen says he's not guilty in 1964 killing of civil rights workers By The Associated Press PHILADELPHIA, Miss.

A stooped, frail-looking 79-year- old former Ku Klux Klan leader was brought into court Friday to answer for one of the most heinous crimes of the civil rights era the killing of three voter-registration workers beaten and shot 40 years ago. Edgar Ray Killen, liis head slightly tilted, uttered a strong "not guilty" three times to three murder charges in a case that marks the latest effort by Mississippi to confront its bloodstained racist past as one of America's most fiercely segregationist states. Killen, a part-time preacher who will turn 80 later this month, was arrested Thursday after being indicted by a grand jury. Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and District Attorney Mark Duncan would not discuss what evidence they developed or exactly what role authorities believe Killen had in the killings, which galvanized public opinion in 1964 and were dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning." But Killen's name has been associated with the case from the beginning. And FBI records and witnesses from a 1960s federal trial in the case indicated that he organized the carloads of Klansmen who followed the civil rights workers out of town and waylaid them on the night of the killings.

James Chaney a 21-year-old black Mississippian, and two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, were stopped by Klansmen, beaten and shot to death. Their bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam. "We've been investigating the case for several years now," Duncan said. "It just finally got to the point where we felt like we had done all that we can do. It was time to present whatever we had to the grand jury and let them make a decision on the case." In 1967, the U.S.

Justice Department tried Killen and 18 other men many of them also reputed Klan members on federal civil rights violations. Seven were convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to 10 years. The all-white jury deadlocked in the case against Killen, and he was freed. Thousands more bodies are discovered Some people only npw reporting loved ones as missing By The Associated Press BANDA ACEH, Indonesia The official death toll from the Asian tsunami climbed dramatically to 147,000 Friday and authorities held out little hope for tens of thousands still missing. Flying over miles of ravaged shoreline, a shaken U.N.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked: "You wonder, where are the people? What has happened to them?" Indonesia said searchers found 7,118 more bodies in the shattered coastal town of Meu- laboh, where families picked through piles of rubble. Indian officials raised that country's toll by 310, most of them killed in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, where 5,600 were missing and presumed dead. Sweden, Britain and France warned they feared that nearly 1,100 of their citizens missing in the disaster were dead. Nearly two weeks after huge NELSON IMANDELA waves struck 11 countries in Asia and Africa, the lists of missing were still rising. Sri Lanka, with more than 30,000 known dead, added 528 names to its ranks of missing, for a total of 4,984.

Indonesia, the worst hit country, estimates 101,318 dead and 10,070 missing. Officials said some people trying to find loved ones were only now reporting them as missing. "First the people tried to find them among the dead, then went around the hospitals. Now they are coming to us," said K.G. Wijesiri at Sri Lanka's National Disaster Management Center The jump in official figures for dead and missing came a day aftei- a United Nations official predicted the final toll would be far higher.

"I think we have to be aware that very very many of the victims have been swept away, and many, many will not reappear," U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said. Annan returned from a helicopter flight Friday over the western coast of Indonesia's Sumatra island unsettled by The Associated Press Ten-year-old Zulfahmi cries in his grandmother's arms Friday inside a hospital in Banda Aceh after they were reunited for the first time, 12 days after the earthquake- triggered tsunami in northwest Indonesia. Zulfahmi lost his parents, brother and sister. the devastation.

"I have never seen such utter destruction mile after mile," he somberly told reporters. "You wonder, where are the people? What has happened to them?" U.S. promises long-term help Secretary of State Colin Powell toured stricken areas in Sri Lanka and promised long-term American help to rebuild. "Only by seeing it on the ground can you really appreciate what it must have been like on that terrible day," he said. People flying over Sumatra have reported a veritable skeleton coast, with bodies still floating at sea.

Bleached concrete pads are all that is left of substantial structures, scattered corrugated iron roofs crumpled like paper the only evidence of flimsier houses. A few intact rise eerily from the wasteland; U.S. Navy pilots and crew-i; men returning to the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln after seven hours of nonstop struggled to find words to scribe the devastation. "You can't really explain. There used to be towns and cities there.

All the people once had homes, lives," said Petty Officer 1st Class Scott Wickland of Cumberland, Wis. "Now there is nothing." Mandela lauded for AIDS disclosure Son died of AIDS complications Thursday night By The Associated Press JOHANNESBURG, South Africa Former President Nelson Mandela's grief- laden disclosure that his son died of complications from AIDS won widespread praise Friday in a country where the pandemic kills more than 600 a day but is stiU shrouded in sUence. NORTHERN IRELAND MANDELA Mandela's successor, Thabo Mbeki, once denied knowing anyone who had died of the disease. The U.N. AIDS agency said Mandela's announcement underscored that the pandemic knows no boundaries at its epicenter in sub-Saharan Africa, home to two-thirds of the more than 39 million people worldwide infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

"Increasingly, all people in this region of the world are being affected by the pandemic," UNAIDS said in a statement from Geneva. Mandela, the anti-apartheid icon who was South Africa's first black president, has become a leading international AIDS campaigner since retiring from political life in 1999. But he said suspected family would be afflicted by the disease. Just hours after Makgatho Mandela died Thursday at age 54, Nelson Mandela went before the media to reveal that his son died of AIDS-related complications and appealed for more openness about the disease. Fighting stigma AIDS activists, opposition politicians, business leaders and others praised Mandela's stand, which they said would help fight the stigma that prevents many of the estimated 1,500 South Africans infected every day from seeking help before it's too late.

"We hope Mandela's courageous courage more people to counseled, tested for HIV and treated where necessary," said the Treatment Action Campaign, which has lobbied for access to life-prolonging anti- retroviral drugs that have turned HIV into a chronic but manageable condition in wealthier countries. The opposition Inkatha Freedom Party whose leader Man- gosuthu Buthelezi also went public when his son died of AlDS-related complications last year, called it a courageous move that would help break the silence about the pandemic. New Hours! 10 am 5 pm 106 S. Santa Fe 785.823.2462 Police: IRA mounted bank robbery British, Irish leaders say this undermines years of peace work By The Associated Press BELFAST, Northern Ireland The Irish Republican Army stole $50 million from a Belfast bank, the Northern Ireland police chief bluntly declared Friday an announcement that rocked the foundations of the peace process. The British and Irish governments accepted Chief Constable Hugh Orde's verdict TIRAQ and said the development had gravely undermined years of effort to revive a Catholic- Protestant administration involving Sinn Fein, the IRA- linked party Power-sharing was the central goal of the Good Friday peace accord of 1998.

A previous coalition involving Sinn Fein collapsed in 2002 because of arguments over IRA activities, and since then, negotiators have been striving in vain to secure the outlawed group's disarmament and disbandment. The Dec. 20 raid on the Northern Bank, when a gang held the families of two employees hostage until the bank's main vault was cleared out, was the biggest cash robbery in history. It came a week after months of negotiations narrowly failed to reach a new power-sharing deal between Sinn Fein, which represents most of the province's Irish Catholics, and the Democratic Unionists, the party backed by most British Protestants. Sinn Fein deputy leader Martin McGuinness, a veteran IRA commander, insisted he had been told by "a very senior person in the IRA that the IRA were not involved." Depression is real, common treatable.

ckmhc Central Kansas Mental Health Center Serving the people of Dickinson, Ellsworth, Lincoln, Ottawa Saline Counties. 809 Elmhurst Salina 823-6322 1-800-794-8281 General warns of possible 'spectacular' attack More than just rehabilitation, it's about carine. "People helpingpeople, making a difimKe togetheri" Lx)i)g, short, rcliabilirative or respite sniy.s On-Sitc pliysical, occupational, spcccli ustorative dierapies Medicine, Medicaid, private pay private insurance payment options Non-discrimination policy Skilled nursing (acility RElfAbiliTATloN CENTER 1007 Johnstown Salina. KS 67401 783-823-7107 By The Associated Press BAGHDAD, Iraq A U.S. general warned Friday that insurgents may be planning "spectacular" attacks to scare voters in the three weeks before Iraq's landmark elections, and Shiite and Sunni religious leaders voiced sharply divergent views on whether the vote should be held at all.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, who is deputy chief of staff for strategic commimica- tions in Iraq, said the United States has no intelligence indicating specific plots, but he said American leaders expected a rise in attacks. He said the insurgents' biggest weapon was their ty to instill fear. "I think a worst case is where they have a series of horrific attacks that cause mass casualties in some spectacular fashion in the days leading up to the elections," Lessel said.

"If you look over the last six months, they have steadily escalated the barbaric nature of the attacks they have been committing. A year ago, you didn't see these kinds of horrific things," he said. In Washington, President Bush expressed optimism about the Jan. 30 elections, saying they will be "an incredibly hopeful experience," despite rising violence and doubts that the vote wiU bring stability and democracy "I know it's hard, but it's hard for a reason," Bush said, adding that the insurgents are trying to impede the elections because they fear freedom. Get Your Friends Together and Come To The Golden Pear iaif Lindsborg 227-2829 BOGEY'S.